Christopher and Jonathan Nolan go Interstellar’

By Ed Symkus, More Content Now

Thursday

Oct 30, 2014 at 2:43 PMOct 30, 2014 at 2:43 PM

The working relationship between brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan goes a long way back. Jonathan, 38, wrote the short story that Christopher, 44, used as the basis for directing his 2000 film “Memento.” The brothers have since collaborated on scripts for “The Prestige,” “The Dark Knight,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” and the new “Interstellar,” all of which Christopher has directed. “Interstellar” combines stories of the Earth’s resources being depleted and of two father-daughter relationships, as well one of space exploration into distant galaxies. It’s at the same time small and intimate, and a gigantic, effects-filled adventure. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Jonathan wrote the original script, then gave it to Christopher for additions, subtractions and a final edit. Both Nolans sat down to talk about the film last week in Los Angeles.

Q. What was the initial idea that eventually became this movie?

Jonathan: I first started to think about this project in 2006 or 2007. I had gotten to a moment where I realized that all those people that landed on the moon did so [a long time ago], and no one had gone back since. I realized that all the speeches about going back there were just speeches. There’s no money there, we’re not going back. And in that moment, there was a melancholy of imagining that as a species, we might have peaked. That was kind of a sad realization. When we were growing up we were promised jet packs, and we get Instagram. Kind of a bum deal. So I was rooted in this optimism of what will be the next moment in which we start to journey, once again.

Christopher: The inception of it for me was talking to Jonathan about the script. He was working on it for Steven Spielberg at the time, but we always bounce ideas off each other, and it sounded incredibly exciting. What got me is the way he originally explained it to me – that we’re going to leave this planet at some point. We’re going to go beyond the moon. We’re going to go to Mars. So there’s an inevitability to human evolution, this being the next step. The idea with this story is that you could view the Earth as the nest, and one day we leave the nest. That seemed like a massive thing that hadn’t been addressed in movies, and that’s the kind of opportunity you’re looking for.

Q. There’s a lot of science and physics and math in the film. How important was it to get it right, and how did you go about doing that?

Christopher: Jonathan spent a long time working with Kip Thorne, a scientist who’s a great resource in knowing everything there is to know in terms of the real physics, of what’s theorized, and what’s known about those issues. I had the advantage of coming onto the project late and being able to look at what these guys had done. A lot of my contribution was stripping things out, because they’d put in a lot of incredible mind-blowing ideas. But I felt that some of it was more mind-blowing than I could absorb as an audience member. So I spent a lot of time in mywork on the script in choosing what I thought were the most emotive, most tactile of these ideas, things that I could really grab a hold of.

Q. The film really looks amazing on the IMAX screen. Was there much input from IMAX and NASA?

Christopher: We did quite a lot of research before we designed the ships and before we figured out how to film it. One of our greatest resources was IMAX, and their relationship with NASA. The [IMAX] cameras we used in the film have actually gone into space. They’ve been in Low Earth orbit and have shot the shuttle and the space station and the repairs of the Hubble. We tried to get the feeling of the detail to be correct. We tried to get the appropriate textures of what this kind of spacecraft would need to be – that weird tension between the physical intimacy of a spaceship and the fragile nature of the industrial quality of it, and then the cosmic scale of where it’s going.

Q. So did this turn out to be a typical collaboration between you two?

Christopher: Every collaboration I’ve done with Jonathan on a script has been different because of our different circumstances, and how we worked together. He worked for a very long time on this one, without me being involved, and then he got very busy doing other things. So it was a bit more along the lines of him going, “OK, take a shot.” Then I showed him what I’d done and luckily he seemed reasonably happy with it (laughs). So it was a different kind of collaboration for us. I think I got to reap the benefits of many years of research and development on his end, and I got to come in with a fresh pair of eyes and make it my own, which is a fun thing to be able do. Hopefully he’s happy with the finished product.

Jonathan: Very happy.

Ed Symkus covers movies for More Content Now.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.